What wine would you buy right now if you had $500 to spend on it?

I mean, let’s say you were given $500 cash, right now, and told the only condition upon receiving it was that you had to spend that money on wine, and you had to buy it right now.

What would you buy?

I’ve been thinking about this question for days and days, and it’s made me curious as to how the intelligent, witty, and better-than-average-looking 1WineDude.com readership would answer it.

Do you blow the whole wad on one wine, like a very-good-but-not-great vintage of Chateau Petrus, just to say t hat you did it at least once? Or go for two bottles of a classified Right Bank Bordeaux?  How about dabbling in a little high-end Burgundy?  Or take a dessert wine tour of the world, through Porto, Madeira, Hungary, Sauternes, Niagara, Jerez…?  Or a bargain-end binge shopping spree, stocking up on fairly-priced wines

It’s a compelling proposition, isn’t it?

Here’s the part that will start to bake your noodle:

Once you’ve decided on an answer… ask yourself Why haven’t I bought myself that wine already?  Is it because $500 isn’t exactly small change in today’s crappy economy?  Catholic guilt preventing you from spending that kind of money on yourself?

I think reading each others’ responses to these questions would be fascinating.

I’ll kick things off – I’d blow the whole wad on one wine, the kind of cultish wine like Petrus that is supposed to blow your mind, just to see if it can really live up to the stratospheric hype factor.

How about YOU?

Cheers!

This week, Wine.com – the largest on-line wine retailer, and still everybody’s “love-to-hate-‘em” choice for performing their own self-serving wine distribution ‘sting’ operation last year – has released the third annual list of their top 100 best selling wines.

The top 10 in that list potentially tell us a lot about U.S. consumer wine buying preferences, because of the size of its business (exact numbers are a bit difficult to come by, as the company is still privately held).  Here they are (click the image to embiggen):

What those top 10 wines tell us is… well, a bit of something old, and a bit of something new…

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As much as social media wine wizards and millennials rail against established wine media, most of them (myself included) share with those ‘old media’ types a similar and mistake-prone approach to wine evaluation and appreciation.

And that is, the rapid-fire assessment, review, and perfunctory judgment of any given wine.  We are judge, jury and executioner of the glass’ contents, often within the span of two minutes.

We see this happen all the time – in fact in some cases (like certain Twitter Taste Live events, or the “speed dating” wine blogging at the Wine Bloggers Conference), it’s encouraged and necessary.  I often participate in and have grown to love those events, provided that we don’t take them too seriously.

And we shouldn’t take them seriously, at least as far as true wine appreciation is concerned.  Why?  Because every glass of wine, from the pedestrian to the sublime, is speaking to you, trying to tell you something about itself – you need only take the actual time to listen to it.

In the case of many wines made in the ‘Old World’ style (what my compadre Randall Grahm calls Modernist), where typicity of place and nuanced complexity are the goals, that message may be “Come back later.”  New World (Postmodernist) wines usually (and probably unfairly) fare better in rapid-fire evaluation scenarios, precisely because they more often offer their treasures quickly and liberally – “Hey! Over here! I’m talkin’ to YOU!”

In a globally-connected, information-based economy like ours, we are progressively programmed with positive reinforcement to spend as little time as possible on something – in fact, we’re rewarded for doing many things at once, and the more quickly we can shove them into the same time slot, the better.

The trouble is, if you want to appreciate wine fully, you need to dump the Speed Racer + Multitasking Pro persona.  Pronto…

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Giveaways – they’re back.  With a vengeance.

I’m teaming up with Sony Music to give away some killer jazz classics, and to hook you up with some American wine.

Many of you know that I’m a music buff, and that I dabble in “Real Life Rock Band” by playing bass guitar for the Steve Liberace Band.  Probably wouldn’t come as a surprise then that I enjoy pairing music with mood and food, almost as much as I do pairing wine with mood and food.

Now it’s time for YOU to talk about how you’d pair some awesome jazz with your favorite wines.

Here’s how this thing will go down:

• Peruse the embedded widget below, which contains selections from five killer jazz albums (I’m especially fond of the Brubeck, Miles, and Tito Puente selections myself).
• Think about what you’d consider an awesome wine pairing for one, several, or all of the cuts.
• Leave a comment on this here post, telling us what wine you’d pair with your selected track(s), and why you think it’s a killer pairing.

The widget has some sweet jazz cuts from the following albums: Tiempo Libre: Bach In Havana , Miles Davis: Sketches of Spain , Charles Mingus: Ah Um, Tito Puente: Dance Mania, & Dave Brubeck: Time Out.

If you can’t find something you like to pair with a good glass of vino out of that selection, then I’d say you have no hope of digging jazz.  I should use this opportunity to point out that Mingus, as a bass player, kicked all kinds of a__.

Anyway…

On Monday, June 8th 2009, I will select a random winner from the comments, using a top secret procedure that involves my dog (no further details will be given – trust me, you don’t wanna know!).  The lucky winner will get hooked up by Sony Music with copies of the 5 recordings featured in the widget, as well as a gift certificate from www.americanwinery.com so you can buy some wine to pair with your new tunes!…
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